The Wisdom Paradox
By Elkhonon Goldberg, Ph.D.
Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families in Anna Karenina, the midlife crisis takes many forms. I first knew that mine was encroaching when halfway through my sixth decade, I began to search for a cathartic experience … I felt a sudden need to take stock of my life and to connect its pieces, disjointed by circumstance. …
For reasons existential more than immediate or practical, I also decided to take stock of the physical damage wrought by time. After many years of blatant self-neglect, I had a long overdue comprehensive physical exam. I was delighted to discover that by all objective medical criteria I was in good health, biologically younger than my chronological age. …
With considerable trepidation, I also decided to have an MRI of my brain, a magnetic resonance imaging procedure to visualize the structures inside of my aging skull. I had no indication that my mind was beginning to fail me. Quite the contrary, I had good reasons to believe that my cognition was fine: I had just published a reasonably successful book. I was lecturing worldwide and continued to get away with tackling arcane technical matters for demanding audiences without notes. At any given time, I was engaged in a number of parallel activities, usually without dropping the ball. My mental life was rich and full. My private practice in neuropsychology was booming and my career flourishing …
… So on a sunny April day, I walked into the offices of Columbus Circle MRI in midtown Manhattan.
The report and the films (not usually released to patients but released to me as a colleague) arrived a few days later. What I saw did not look terrible, but it did not particularly please me either…My cortical sulci (the walnut-shaped convolutions on the surface of the brain) and ventricles (spaces inside the brain containing the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain) were declared by the radiologist to be “normal in size.” By my own reckoning, the sulci unequivocally were, but the ventricles looked large to me, even allowing for the expected, normal dilation (the technical term for enlargement) with age. This suggested some brain atrophy. …
To lay my apprehensions to rest, I paid a visit to one of New York’s top neurologists, Dr. John Caronna at the famed New York Presbyterian Hospital… a genial and gregarious man, (he) examined me carefully, looked at my scans, and showed them to a colleague … They both concluded that everything was normal for my age. …
“It’s just a well-used brain, that’s all,” said Caronna with his characteristic endearing sense of humor. …
The Mind, the Brain, and the Body
In the eyes of health professionals, the utility of an early diagnosis of the potentially dementing diseases of the brain is often doubted on the grounds that “nothing can be done about it anyway.” … This tacit and sometimes not-so-tacit assumption, so sadly accurate even a decade ago, is rapidly becoming obsolete, owing to the rapid advent of various pharmacological and nonpharmacological ways of protecting the brain against decay. In plain terms, the assumption that “nothing can be done” is no longer true. …
… Like most things in life and in nature, brain health versus brain damage is not a simple binary distinction. There are shades of gray … even when it comes to the gray matter, so to speak …
Are age-associated mental changes all losses, or are there also some gains? As I am surveying introspectively my own mental landscape, I conclude that, despite my anxieties and increasingly precarious epidemiological odds, things are not all bad. I notice, with some satisfaction, that on balance I am no more stupid in some intuitive sense than I was 30 years ago. My mind is not dimmed; in some ways it may in fact be working better. …
What strikes me most in this introspective pursuit is that if there is a change, it cannot be captured in quantitative comparisons. On balance, my mind is neither weaker nor stronger than it was decades ago. It is different. What used to be the subject of involved problem-solving has become more akin to pattern recognition. I am not nearly as good at laborious, grinding, focused mental computations; but then again I do not experience the need to resort to them as often.…
But other things have become easier. Something rather intriguing is happening in my mind that did not happen in the past. Frequently, when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.
And another interesting bit of introspection: As I am trying to solve a thorny problem, a seemingly distant association often pops up like a deus ex machina, unrelated at first glance but in the end offering a marvelously effective solution to the problem at hand. Things that in the past were separate now reveal their connections. This, too, happens effortlessly, by itself, while I experience myself more as a passive recipient of a mental windfall than as an active, straining agent of my mental life. …
What are they, these strange phenomena of mental levitation, when solutions come instantly and without apparent effort? Is it, perchance, that coveted attribute of aging, that stuff of sages called wisdom? At first I feared getting carried away, lest my foray into the mysteries of wisdom prove to be an exercise in foolishness. I sought to stay away from such expansive poetic language and stick to the austere language of science, which has been my language most of my life, to speak not of “wisdom” but of “pattern recognition.”…
Duality is one of the main features of brain design and its enduring enigma … (This book) will examine a radically new idea about brain duality: The right hemisphere is the “novelty” hemisphere and the left hemisphere is the repository of well-developed patterns. This means that as we age and accumulate more patterns, a gradual change in the hemispheric “balance of power” takes place: The role of the right hemisphere diminishes and the role of the left hemisphere grows. As we age, we rely increasingly on the left hemisphere. …
Aging affects the two halves of the brain differently: The right hemisphere “shrinks” but the left hemisphere shows greater resilience. …
What is behind this mysterious disparity? The answer lies in the lifelong brain plasticity … Contrary to the beliefs held by most scientists until very recently, new nerve cells (neurons) are born in the brain as long as we live. The birth of new neurons and where in the brain they end up are regulated by mental activity. The more we use our brain, the more new neurons we grow, and these neurons end up in the most-used parts of the brain. As we age, we increasingly use our left hemisphere, which in turn protects it from decay.
This leads to a startling conclusion, deemed fantastic even a few years ago: You can increase your brain longevity by exercising your brain. …
… Aging, on balance, is not all bad. In fact, it may be something to look forward to and enjoy. If we value wisdom, then aging is a fair price to pay for it.
Excerpts taken with permission from the introduction of The Wisdom Paradox, How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group, 2005 ($26). A $15 paperback version of the book, ISBN 1-592-40187-2, has just been released.
